About

Our Story

Customer Needs Defined Alpin

We knew we’d hit on something special when our first enterprise early adopters called Alpin “a dream wish list come true,” “the tool I want to use every day to manage my SaaS” and “the only way I can get the information I need.”

Getting to that point wasn’t a straight line. Alpin is built on the highly secure foundation of our first product, Logrr: an identity and access management product that uses cryptography and biometry on a mobile device to allow employees to log into their corporate applications, without ever using a password. Logrr got rave reviews for its groundbreaking security and ease of use. But it was in a crowded space with credible alternatives and long implementation cycles.

We knew a lot about connecting users and applications, in a very secure environment. And we had built a portal for administrators to manage the connections between users and their SaaS applications. We dramatically expanded the functionality of that portal, in a quest to be the One Dashboard to Rule Them All.

We worked with those early adopters and a host of prospective customers, directly using their input to define Alpin’s capabilities. Alpin became the perfect tool to understand and manage cloud software applications in a single place.

Alpin users are no longer running around with spreadsheets, trying to figure out which applications exist, who is using them, what they cost, when they will be renewing, etc.

Alpin has become the central dashboard to see what’s happening, and the control panel to take action on important de-provisioning tasks and security risks. Customers leverage Alpin’s insights to do things that were previously impossible, like finding all the users of a particular application so the compliance team can examine activity, and blacklisting multiple applications that present unacceptable security risks — all at the touch of a button.

We upgrade Alpin every two weeks to make it even more useful, so it continues to deliver a hard ROI on cost savings, and help immeasurably in doing the day-to-day activities required to stay on top of your SaaS landscape.

Leadership

Julien Denaes

Co-Founder & CEO

Julien oversees all company strategy and business activities, and drives the company’s strong commitment to its culture and core values. While leading Alpin, he was a Global Entrepreneur in Residence at CU Boulder, where he provided guidance to over 500 students, coached over 100 startups, served as a speaker, panelist and judge on dozens of expert panels, and co-led programs throughout the Boulder-Denver region (and earlier, in New York City and Montréal). He guided Alpin’s successful acceptance into several highly-selective startup accelerators, including The Founder Institute (one of 12 companies chosen out of 750 applicants), FounderLab (by winning first place out of the 12 Founder Institute companies), Startup Next and Techstars (one of 11 companies chosen out of 2,000), improving the company and its ability to deliver value to customers at each stage. He is a cloud security expert and an accomplished mobile app and front end developer, creating systems that have withstood extensive penetration testing efforts by Alpin’s customers. Before co-founding Alpin, he led teams designing new systems for large global clients including Nestlé, Richemont (owner of luxury brands such as Cartier, Montblanc, Van Cleef & Arpels and many more), Nespresso, the United Nations and others. While at Cambridge Technology Partners, he was the relationship owner with Richemont, and while at Itecor, he rescued and fortified a troubled relationship with Nestlé. Previously, he was at SAP and, while still in school, started his own business as a webmaster and IT consultant.

Benjamin Soulier

Co-Founder

Benjamin is the architect behind Alpin, applying his exceptional knowledge of cloud application architecture, distributed scaling, security-oriented development and identity management and federation, to create a solid and scalable foundation for the platform. He is a veteran leader of global engineering teams. Prior to co-founding Alpin, he served at Cambridge Technology Partners in Geneva, building systems for global organizations such as the United Nations and HSBC. Previously, he was an ECM expert at Japan Tobacco International, where he built from the ground up a complete social platform. At Nestlé, he re-designed the architecture of an internal mobile platform that communicates with millions of connected devices. Prior to these positions, he was a web application development expert for companies in the finance, maritime shipping, food, and automotive industries. Benjamin is well-versed in dozens of development languages, environments, protocols and tools. He earned the very rare Microsoft Azure MVP designation based on his outstanding contributions to the design and implementation of Azure in a series of intricate and demanding large-scale deployments.

Mark Evans

Co-Founder

Mark focuses on revenue generation and customer championship, as well as product, strategy and administration (finance, legal, and HR). He is an angel investor in 14 companies (including several SaaS startups) and 2 funds, is on the board of a B2B SaaS company, and is a mentor to many startup companies across an array of industries and business models. Prior to Alpin, he was co-founder and CEO of a SaaS marketing technology company serving small to medium businesses, and co-founder of a marketing agency where he helped hundreds of clients add customers and grow revenues. Previously, he was General Manager of a publicly traded company (Goto.com/Overture, sold to Yahoo! for a bit under $2 billion), with a $163 million P&L for the largest business unit. Earlier, he was a consultant at McKinsey, and has an MBA from Wharton.

Board

David Campbell

Board Member

David was more recently the Chief Security Officer of SendGrid. He is a veteran and visionary in the field of cyber security, with two decades of experience leading security operations and companies, and providing security assessment and business-focused remediation assistance to organizations ranging from startups to public companies. A highly technical entrepreneur, he developed one of the first effective DDOS mitigation services in 2001, and won The Wall Street Journal’s Data Privacy and Transparency Hackathon in 2012. Previously, he co-founded JumpCloud, Electric Alchemy and MobileScope, and served at ABN AMRO, Washington Mutual and the United States Antarctic Program.

Denise Franklin

Board Member

Denise created the extremely productive self-serve channel as VP Revenue at SendGrid. Under her leadership, the email services company grew to more than $40 million in revenue in four years. She serves on the Board of Directors and Advisory Board for several growing firms, and acts as a mentor to startups in Techstars, MergeLane, Founder Institute and Galvanize. As a startup exec, mentor and board member, she helps companies dramatically accelerate growth. Previously, she held senior marketing roles at Logitech, Google, DoubleClick and MessageMedia.

Judson Valeski

Board Member

Jud is General Manager at Honey, a large and rapidly-growing consumer software company that automates deal and product discovery. He brings profound expertise in building scalable systems, and scalable business practices, to the companies he works with. He has more than 20 years’ worth of experience in tech, including time as CEO and CTO of Gnip (acquired by Twitter) and nearly five years at AOL, where he negotiated the Mozilla spin-out. Prior to AOL, he was at Internet pioneer Netscape, following engineering roles at OneBox, IBM and Microsoft. Prior to Honey, he was Chief Technology Officer of Techstars. He has played a central role in the public release of consumer software products used by tens of millions of people worldwide.

Advisors

Bruno Morency

Advisor

Bruno is Managing Director of Techstars Montreal AI. His background is in engineering, but he loves bringing tech products to market and selling them as much as he loves building them. He applies that passion by mentoring tech startups with strategic advice, and sometimes by diving deep into coding production systems. Previously, he was Head of Operations at Poka Inc., a social platform that focuses on efficient training, knowledge retention and real-time troubleshooting in the manufacturing world. He founded Context.IO (acquired by Return Path in 2012), an API that makes it easy and fast for developers to integrate email data in their applications.

Eric Daugherty

Advisor & Board Observer

Eric is COO at POSSIBLE Mobile. He has almost twenty years of experience developing web and mobile applications, and leading the companies that build them. From his years working for small firms all the way up to large public companies like BEA Systems, Eric knows the ins and outs of all types of professional service firms and their enterprise customers and clients. Previously, Eric was instrumental in the growth and development of Geneca, a consultancy focused on delivering enterprise development services to Fortune 1000 companies, which quintupled in size during a four-year period. He has served as architect, developer and consultant at firms including Gorilla Logic, BroadHop, Capable Networks, ADEXS, Bauhaus Technologies and Crowe Creek.

Jenny Fielding

Advisor

Jenny is Managing Director of Techstars, where she leads both the Fintech and Internet of Things accelerators in New York City. Prior to joining Techstars, Jenny headed up corporate venture and digital innovation at BBC Worldwide, where she founded BBC Labs, a corporate Accelerator for early stage digital media tech companies, made strategic investments and led business development deals. She has also started several companies, most notably Switch-Mobile, a mobile VoIP company that was acquired in 2008. She began her career as a lawyer with Wieden & Kennedy, and was a banker with JP Morgan.

Rami Essaid

Advisor

Rami is Co-Founder & Chief Product and Strategy Officer of Distil Networks, where he was previously CEO. He is a serial entrepreneur with almost 15 years of experience in telecommunications, network security and cloud infrastructure management. Rami started his first company in childhood selling shoe-shine kits door-to-door, and has been building companies ever since. Prior to Distil, he advised enterprise clients on cloud infrastructure and security at Neustar’s IIS group. Previously, he founded ChitChat communications, a mobile communications company, which he later sold. As a member of the inaugural class of Techstars, Rami believes in giving back to the community and actively participates as an advisor and mentor to enterprise-focused companies around the world, helping them embrace the cloud to scale their businesses and brands.

Sergio Escobar

Advisor

Sergio is Managing Director at Founder Institute Montreal. He is an angel investor in companies representing sectors including artificial intelligence, drones, wearables, edtech, productivity software, e-commerce, marketplaces, fintech and consumer apps. He is a tech entrepreneur with experience in aerospace, e-commerce and mobile payment startups — and, outside of tech, ostrich farming. He is deeply involved in the startup ecosystem, centered in Montreal and extending to startup communities worldwide, by speaking and mentoring at events such as Startup Chile, Startup Peru, Startup Bootcamp FinTech London, MsB Tunisia, Kuwait National Fund, Techstars Startup Programs, Founder Institute, and the World Bank Tech Entrepreneurship Program for Innovation in the Caribbean.